After a stroke leaves her husband mentally disabled and fundamentally changed, spirited Irish housewife Vanetia struggles to keep her family together in the wake of tragedy. A research grant from American doctor Ted Fielding, interested in documenting the family’s recovery process, allows them to get by. Though Vanetia initially resents living under Ted’s microscope, she soon finds comfort in his calming presence, while Ted responds to Vanetia’s dynamic, unpredictable personality. As the two explore their bond within their unique situation, a new family begins to emerge.

Directed by Academy Award-nominee Steph Green and featuring Saturday Night Live star Will Forte in an impressive dramatic debut, this life-affirming film embraces the healing power of love and family in all of its idiosyncratic forms. Run and Jump is an unexpected, unconventional romance, intimate family portrait and emotional journey of recovery that ultimately uplifts through its heartfelt message of human connection and the power of acceptance. - Cara Cusumano / Tribeca Film Festival 2013

Wednesday October 8 – Coda + The Golden Dream
On Wednesday October 8, we'll also be running a short, Coda, followed by the full-feature film: The Golden Dream.

Directed by Alan Holly, CODA is the culmination of two years of painstaking work by a small team of animation artists. The film tells the story of a lost soul who stumbles drunkenly through the city. In a park, death finds him and shows him many things.

This nine-minute, hand-drawn animated film is voiced by Brian Gleeson (Standby, The Stag, Love/Hate) and Orla Fitzgerald (The Wind that Shakes the Barley).

Winner: Best Animated Short Film at the South by SouthWest (SXSW) film festival in Austin, Texas

In order to escape from the squalid barrio in which they live, young Guatemalan teens Juan, Sara and Samuel make the decision to attempt the 1,200 mile-long arduous border crossing into “The Golden Cage”, i.e. USA, via Mexico in search of a better life. In order to blend in with the group and protect herself from the harm a woman can suffer on the journey, Sara initially disguises herself as a boy named Oswaldo.

Not long after their departure, the group encounter Chauk, an Tzotzil Indian who speaks virtually no Spanish. Despite Juan’s fervent and passionate opposition, Sara insists they allow Chauk to join the gang. A harsh road follows as the four children show inspiring bravery in the face of relentless danger and obstacles, both natural and manmade. All the while, they risk arrest, deportation and death. From the first frame to the last hopeless moment, this is a heart-wrenching story of hope, friendship, survival, love and desperation, and a profound homage to the treacherous journey thousands of immigrants undertake each year. - Spanish Film Festival 2013

Kristin Scott Thomas plays Lucie, the downtrodden wife of terminally grumpy surgeon Paul (played by Daniel Auteuil), who maintains a sleekly modern forest home. Paul seems bored and distracted, but we come to learn that he has been receiving red flowers from a woman who wants to thank him for some surgery he claims not to have performed.

Before the Winter Chill is the second collaboration between director and writer Philippe Claudel and England’s greatest gift to French cinema, Kristin Scott Thomas. Their first film together was I’ve Loved You So Long, which became one of the most talked about film of 2008. This is another sublime, elegant slow-burner, and looks all set to repeat that success. - 20th Bradford International Film Festival 2013

Juliette Binoche plays Rebecca, a war photographer who constantly risks harm just to capture the perfect shot. It's a passion that's earned her many awards, but one that also leaves her family in constant fear. During a trip to Afghanistan, Rebecca is injured while accompanying a female suicide bomber to Kabul. When she returns home to Ireland, her husband makes it clear that he's fed up. With regret, Rebecca retires her camera and decides to focus her energy on her family. Her oldest daughter Steph begins to show an interest in humanitarian work after doing a project for school. One of Rebecca's connections offers her an opportunity to take Steph to Kenya to visit a refugee camp. Under the assurance that the trip will be safe, her husband agrees to let them go. When the camp is attacked, Rebecca's priorities will once again be tested. Will her desire to document tragedy come before her safety and her daughter’s? Binoche is absolutely superb as a highly conflicted, work-obsessed photojournalist. - Cleveland Film Festival 2014

Colin lives a truly charmed life. A helpful mouse works around his house and he has invented a Pianocktail, an instrument that makes cocktails based on what you play. However, his friends Chick and Nicolas have found love. This is the one thing that has eluded Colin. One night, at a dog's birthday party, he is introduced to Chloe. They fall in love and are happily married. But Chloe develops strange music in her lung that quickly turns into a water lily. Is their happy life about to shatter? Odd, you say? Nothing is odd in Michel Gondry's wonderful fantasy, where people and rooms change shape to suit their needs and time and space have no rules or boundaries. MOOD INDIGO is a world unto itself, where doorbells are living things and the Church only marries the winners of an insane go-cart race. This exhilarating cinematic toy box crams each frame with visual treats and delightful tricks. Once this film drops you down its romantic rabbit-hole, reality happily vanishes! - Cleveland International Film Festival 2014

The Côte d’Azur. 1915. In his twilight years, Pierre-Auguste Renoir is tormented by the loss of his wife, the pains of arthritic old age and the terrible news that his son Jean has been wounded in action. But when a young girl miraculously enters his world, the old painter is filled with a new, wholly unexpected energy. Blazing with life, radiantly beautiful, Andrée will become his last model, and the wellspring of a remarkable rejuvenation.

Back at the family home to convalesce, Jean too falls under the spell of the new, redheaded star in the Renoir firmament. In their Mediterranean Eden - and in the face of his father's fierce opposition - he falls in love with this wild, untameable spirit... and as he does so, within weak-willed, battle-shaken Jean, a filmmaker begins to grow. - Cannes Film Festival 2012

Shun Li works in a textile factory in the outskirts of Rome, in order to get her papers and enable her eight-year-old son to come to Italy. She is suddenly transferred to Chioggia, a small city-island in the Venetian lagoon, to work as a bartender in a pub. Bepi, a Slavic fisherman nicknamed ‘the Poet’ by his friends, has been a regular at that little pub for years.

The friendship between Shun Li and Bepi upsets both the Chinese and native communities, who interfere with this new relationship, which appears to place all concerned in a state of fear. A truly poignant and poetic account of the destructive power of prejudice and friendship in a foreign territory. - Cork Film Festival 2012

Didier and Elise’s relationship is stormy and passionate; it’s love at first sight. Didier plays the banjo in a bluegrass band, lives in a caravan in the Belgian countryside and idolises America as the ‘land of the free’. Elise owns her own tattoo parlour. Her body is plastered with images – little mementos of past lovers whose names have been carefully covered up by new tattoos. Before long their two lives are closely intertwined. Elise sings in Didier’s band and they soon have a daughter together, little Maybelle, with whom they move into a lovingly if unconventionally restored country house. This film accompanies Elise and Didier on their rollercoaster ride through life; through days filled with their love of music and their mutual passion.

Based on the stage play by Johan Heldenbergh and Mieke Dobbels, director Felix van Groeningen portrays various episodes in Elise and Didier’s story. The film’s barn-stomping blue grass concert footage and enthralling love story are delightfully reminiscent of the grand old days of American country music. - Berlin Film Festival 2013

In the first full-length feature film shot entirely inside Saudi Arabia, Wadjda tells the story of a 10-year-old girl living in a suburb of Riyadh, the capital. After a fight with her friend Abdullah, Wadjda sees a beautiful green bicycle for sale. She wants the bicycle desperately so that she can beat Abdullah in a race. But Wadjda's mother won't allow it, fearing repercussions from a society that sees bicycles as dangerous to a girl's virtue. So Wadjda decides to try to raise the money herself. A cash prize for a Quran recitation competition at her school leads Wadjda to become a model pious girl as she devotes herself to the memorisation of Quranic verses. The Quran competition isn't going to be easy, especially for a troublemaker like Wadjda, but she is determined to fight for her dreams... with or without society's approval. - Human Rights Watch Film Festival London 2013

Safe House director Daniel Espinosa first grabbed attention with this violent, vice-like thriller based on the bestselling novel by criminal defence attorney Jens Lapidus. Praised for its dynamic storytelling and tangy evocation of a multicultural Sweden, it finds its focus in handsome economics student JW, a man who has dipped his toes in the drug trade and discovered that he is now swimming with sharks. Escaped con Jorge is lining up a massive cocaine deal that will smash the Serbian mafia’s control of the local drug trade. Mafia enforcer Mrado is not about to let that happen and somewhere in the middle there is slick, resourceful JW who works for Jorge’s partners in crime. - Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2013

Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan play a middle-aged, middle-class couple who visit Paris for a long weekend in hopes of rekindling their relationship—or, perhaps, to bring it to an end. Diffident, wistful Nick (Broadbent) and demanding, take-charge Meg (Lindsay Duncan) careen from harmony to disharmony to resignation and back again as they take stock and grapple with love, loss, regret and, disappointment, in their own very English way. When they accept a dinner invitation from Nick’s old friend Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), an American academic superstar with a fancy Parisian address, the film strikes one surprising grace note after another, building to a lyrical ending that is, incidentally, one of the loveliest movie homages (in this case, to Godard’s Band of Outsiders) in years. This magically buoyant, bittersweet comedy drama, starring two of Britain’s national treasures, is a new peak in the ongoing collaboration between screenwriter Hanif Kureishi and director Roger Michell. - New York Film Festival 2013